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Early life[edit]

Stiles was born in New York City,[1] the eldest of three children. Her mother, Judith Newcomb Stiles, is a potter, and her father, John O'Hara, is a businessman.[2] Stiles is of English, Irish, and German descent.[3] She started acting at the age of eleven, performing with New York's La MaMa Theatre Company.[4]

Stiles's next commercial success was in Save the Last Dance (2001) as an aspiring ballerina forced to leave her small town in downstate Illinois to live with her struggling musician father in Chicago after her mother dies in a car accident. At her new, nearly all-black school, she falls in love with the character played by Sean Patrick Thomas, who teaches her hip-hop dance steps that get her into The Juilliard School. The role won her two more MTV awards for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance, and a Teen Choice Award for best fight scene for her battle with Bianca Lawson. Rolling Stone pronounced her "the coolest co-ed," putting her on the cover of its April 12, 2001 issue.[7] She told Rolling Stone that she performed all her own dancing in the film, though the way the film was shot and edited might have made it appear otherwise.[7]

Between the Bourne films, she appeared in Mona Lisa Smile (2003) as Joan, a student at Wellesley College in 1953, whose art professor (Julia Roberts) encourages her to pursue a career in law rather than become a wife and mother. Critic Stephen Holden referred to her as one of cinema's "brightest young stars,"[9] but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews. Stiles played a Wisconsin college student who is swept off her feet by a Danish prince in The Prince and Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge. Stiles told an interviewer that she was very similar to the character, Paige Morgan. Critic Scott Foundas said while she was, as always, "irrepressibly engaging," the film was a "strange career choice for Stiles."[10] This echoed criticism in reviews of A Guy Thing (2003), a romantic comedy with Jason Lee and Selma Blair. Critic Dennis Harvey wrote that Stiles was "wasted,"[11] and Stephen Holden called her "a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally".[12] In 2005, Stiles was cast opposite her Hamlet co-star Liev Schreiber in The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror film. The film was released on June 6, 2006.[13] She returned to the Bourne series with a much larger role in The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007, which is her highest grossing film to date.

In June 2012, the web series Blue, produced by WIGS, premiered. It stars Stiles as a single mother with a 13-year-old son. She works at an office and also as a call girl in order to make ends meet on an otherwise meager income, and must fight to protect her son from the collision between her complicated past and tenuous present.[36]

She is an ex-vegan, occasionally eating red meat.[42] She says she gave up veganism after she developed anemia and found it difficult to get proper nutrition while traveling.[42] Stiles has described herself as a feminist and wrote on the subject in The Guardian.[20]